What would a great power war have looked like in the 1890s?

The 1890s were devoid of large scale warfare between peer competitors. The wars that did occur were usually colonial ones or short wars with one side having a significant advantage at the outset (Greco-Turkish, Sino-Japanese).

The 1890s also occupies a strange place in world technology, when many of the technologies that made World War 1 so deadly were nonexistant or just in their experimental stage, such as the machine gun, the combustion engine and automobile, the submarine, the aircraft, poison gas, indirect artillery fire, flamethowers, and more.

What would a great power war look like in the 1890s, such as a renewed Franco-German War or Russo-German War? Would it look more like the Civil War or Franco-Prussian War, with armies still fighting set-piece engagements (on a scale never before seen) and individual campaigns, or more like World War 1, with warfare occurring along an entire front instead of just around an advancing army?
 
I think such a war would be the last gasp of set-piece engagements like the Civil War. The technology was on the cusp of modernizing to WWI-levels, at least for the most devastating parts like machine guns and indirect artillery, so the war would probably end with either a stalemate gradually evolving on a front as a continental power utilizes machine guns, or with the entire war playing out as did the Civil War and, to a lesser degree, the Napoleonic Wars: the last set-piece war in history.
 
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